The Student & The Professor: Two Perspectives on Engineering Education in Africa

JOHNSON I. EJIMANYA is a one-man pony express. Walking the exhaust-fogged streets of Owerri, Nigeria, Ejimanya, the engineering dean of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, carries with him a department's worth of communications, some handwritten, others on disk. He's delivering them to a man with a PC and an Internet connection, who converts the missives into emails and downloads the responses. To Ejimanya, broadband means lugging a big bundle of printed emails back with him to the university, which despite being one of the country's largest and most prestigious engineering schools has no reliable means of connecting to the Internet.